Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Spiritual Gifts

Good afternoon. I'm a week away from taking my
daughter to her Junior Leadership Conference in
Washington D.C. We're dropping her and then the
family and I will see the city until we've
overdosed on museums. Hopefully, I will not spend
a lot of time working on my laptop. All work and
no play make Jack a dull boy, so the saying goes.
Do you take your laptop on vacation or just
totally disconnect?

I've had an interesting week. Attended a half-day
Mens' retreat to investigate my spiritual gifts.
After answering a lengthy survey, my top scores
were in Administration, Leadership and Wisdom. Did
not come as a huge revelation, but did make me
think about how I am applying my gifts to help
others.

Obviously through consulting I am helping
customers, and I try through my newsletters and
blog entries to help subscribers and virtual
friends. I guess the question is how can I do
more?

Of course, extending my body of knowledge out
through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Linked In
is a good start, and I've recently started
including links to my newsletters in all of these
distribution vehicles as well as through my two
blogs. Two blogs? yes, I maintain one for business
and one for pleasure. The business blog may be
found here:

http://marketingcowboy.blogspot.com/

The pleasure blog is for magicians. That's one of
those things I don't speak a lot about because it
has a limited and highly targeted audience. If you
have multiple areas of subject matter expertise,
you might consider creating some micro blogs for
different audiences. My magic blog for those who
are interested is here:

http://steveschneiderman.blogspot.com/

I do maintain a Facebook account here:

http://www.facebook.com/schneiderman

If you have not tried to secure your personalized
Facebook URL then you are missing the boat here.

If you want to follow me on Twitter, use this
URL:

http://twitter.com/sschneiderman

Does all of this social networking actually
accomplish anything? I'm not sure yet, but I am
giving it a whirl. I find most of the stuff posted
these days to consist of self-indulgent drivel. I
don't know about you, but I don't really care if
you are sitting in Starbucks having coffee reading
the morning newspaper.

Back to gifts.

When was the last time you really thought hard
about what your gifts are and how you were using
them? It certainly gives one a chance to pause and
think, hmmmmmmm.

At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself,
earning a living aside, is there a way for you to
apply your knowledge and experience to help
someone else pro bono. If that's a dirty word for
you, then you've probably read enough of this
newsletter ;)

It used to be a dirty word for me, but I've made
a concerted effort to make time daily to respond
to email requests seeking advice and help. Most of
these requests come from people younger or older
than I who are newbies online, often seeking to
earn a living online or to augment their income
from their day job. I've been doing both of these
things for years, so why not share what I know?
While many of these people have not been able to
afford my services at the time they first
contacted me, some have referred me to others or
returned to me in the future to pay me for my
services, so I think it does come back to you.

Interesting in taking a spiritual gifts test? I found
the identical one I took listed here:

http://www.kodachrome.org/spiritgift/

Go ahead and try it. Even if you are not that spiritual
it might reveal areas of strength you may never have
considered.

I would also advise looking at low scores to examine
areas of your life you may need to work on and strengthen.

Until next time,

Steven

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